I have a Sony Vaio (for my sins) that is only eight months old. Last week it suddenly would not do anything and once it turned off we couldn't get it rebooted for hours. Eventually I was able to get it on the start up screen and performed a system restore which gave me a working laptop for another day and I copied everything onto a hard drive. For the last few days I've had similar problems but system restores haven't helped and if I can get the machine started it takes almost ten minutes to respond to whatever I try to open. Everything came pre installed so I have no discs of any kind other than office - I have today been able to try and fix things with vaio care but it terminates half way through. After performing hardware diagnostics it has failed the linear seek test, funnel seek test and surface scan. I am in the middle of writing my dissertation and while yes I have it backed up I can ill afford losing my laptop for however long it takes to send off to Sony. Can anyone help? Is this is a virus or a dying hard drive? If the latter is true isn't my machine a little young to be in such a poor state? I use it for office, Internet, emails, and iTunes only and really should have just got all the rest of the crap that comes on it cleared . This is goodbye to windows and Sony from me once this is fixed.